While the Daddy's Little Toy discourse is hot, I wanted to chime in some thoughts I had. Mainly on the (weirdly) debated topic of whether or not fiction has any real world impact, and in this case whether reading that book would cause someone to harm actual children.
Human beings, they have morals. These morals vary widely and are shaped by people and events growing up and even through adulthood.
These morals can be rigid and basically universally accepted (rape is bad period, no exceptions), rigid but with variance within society (you should never eat meat vs eating all meat is okay vs eating some meat is okay such as kosher or halal), or even flexible (murder is bad, except in cases of self defense or war). They can also vary over time (as a teen you think homosexuality is bad, as an adult you're queer supportive).
With that, I'd like to state my main point:
Yes, fiction *can* impact and shape your morals and behaviour, but it can not push you outside of those existing moral boundaries.
For example, a person may watch the Addam's Family and say "I like how Gomez treats Morticia, I'm gonna treat my future wife just like that". This is a case of fiction impacting your morals, within an existing moral framework. The person already was going to respect their wife, but now they'll do it differently
If you took a man who beats his wife and showed him the same show, he's not likely to stop beating his wife, just because a show demonstrated how to treat a wife.
Additionally, if you showed an average Joe American Psycho, they're not gonna go become a Wall Street stockbroker and kill women. That's because they already see homicide as wrong.
Fiction can not move your morals, it can only reshape them, and only ever for the better. It can push you to want to be a good person, but it can't push you to want to be a bad person.
We're not blank slates that will just blindly do whatever is shown in a book or show. We have morals that we bring into media consumption, that tells us "Hey this guy is good" or "this guy is bad". We have morals to tell us that, it's not the authors job to say "This man is a bad man", and "this man is a good man". To think that we are going to replicate whatever we read is to think that we don't have any morals of our own and we rely on media to tell us how to act.
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